Is Google LSA Actually Worth It for Your Trade? Run the Numbers.

Everybody is pitching you Local Services Ads right now. Before you hand Google a card, there is one calculation that tells you whether LSA will make you money or quietly drain it.

Most people selling it will not show you this math, because the honest answer is not always yes. For some shops, on some days, LSA is a money printer. For others, it is a leak with a Google logo on it. The difference is not luck. It is a number you can work out in five minutes.

The Only Number That Decides It

Forget cost per lead for a second. The number that tells you if LSA works for you is cost per booked job.

Here is the whole formula:

Then you ask one question: is that number smaller than the profit you make on a job? If yes, every dollar you put in comes back with friends. If no, you are paying Google more to get a customer than the customer is worth, and no amount of “but the leads are coming in” fixes that.

(If you want the full breakdown of why cost per lead on its own is a vanity number, we wrote a whole piece on it. This one is about plugging your actual trade into the math.)

Google Local Services Ads Cost Per Lead Benchmarks By Trade

Here are the typical lead costs and job values we see across the trades we run LSA for. Lead costs move by market and season, so treat these as the middle of the range, not a promise.

Now watch what happens when you run each one through the formula. We will use a close rate of one booked job for every three leads (33%), which is a reasonable middle for a shop that answers the phone and follows up. Your real rate might be better or worse, that is the point of doing your own math.

• Pest control. $35 a lead, book one in three, that is $105 per booked job on a $400 ticket. And pest is recurring, so that customer is worth a lot more than one visit. Easy yes.
• Electrical. $55 a lead, one in three, $165 per booked job on a $550 ticket. Works, with room to spare, as long as you keep that close rate up.
• Plumbing. $70 a lead, one in three, $210 per booked job on a $650 ticket. Profitable, and most plumbing turns into bigger work once you are in the door.
• HVAC. $60 a lead, one in three, $180 per booked job on a $1,650 ticket. Not close. Print money.
• Tree service. $70 a lead, one in three, $210 per booked job on an $1,800 ticket. Not close.
• Roofing. $100 a lead, one in four (25%, because roofs are a bigger, slower decision so close rates run lower), $400 per booked job on a $15,000 ticket. You could close one in ten and still win.

For most trades, run at a normal close rate, the math is not even a debate. The lead is a rounding error against the job.

The Lever That Changes Everything: Your Close Rate

Notice that the cost per lead is the part you mostly cannot control. Google sets that. The part you can control is the bottom of the formula, your close rate, and it swings the whole answer.

Same trade, same lead cost, two electricians:

• Electrician A answers every call, calls back fast, books one in three. Cost per booked job: $165. Healthy.
• Electrician B lets half the calls hit voicemail and follows up slow, books one in ten. Cost per booked job: $550. That is his entire ticket. He is working for free and calling it marketing.

Both paid Google the exact same $55 a lead. One built a business with it. The other torched cash and blamed LSA.

The honest takeaway

LSA almost never fails because the leads are too expensive. It fails because the leads hit a phone nobody answers. Fix the close rate before you blame the channel.

Are After-Hours Leads Junk? The Data Says No.

A lot of contractors want to shut their ads off at night to save money, on the theory that nobody serious calls after five. We looked at this across 1,715 real calls, and the theory does not hold.

About one in six of those calls came in before 8am or after 5pm, and they scored about the same quality as daytime calls. Not dramatically better, not dramatically worse, roughly even. What stood out was what the after-hours emergencies were: a homeowner with a Freon leak in a dying AC unit, a caller with a tree leaning over his roofline. Real, high-value, time-sensitive jobs. And the ones we read through were answered and booked, some on calls that ran six and seven minutes long.

So the lesson is not “turn your ads off at night.” For emergency trades especially, that is where some of your best jobs live, and the competitor in the next box would love to take them. The lesson is the same one as everything else here: a night lead is real money only if someone picks up. If you run ads after hours with no one to answer, you are not saving money, you are paying for calls you will never close. Either staff it or schedule your ads to the hours you actually cover.

When LSA Is Not Worth It (Yet)

We would rather tell you the truth than sign you up to lose money, so here is when to wait.

Your phone goes unanswered. If half your calls go to voicemail, you will pay full price for leads and book a fraction of them. Get your call handling fixed first, then turn on the spend. Otherwise you are funding a leak.

Your ticket is small and your close rate is shaky. A $300 average job with a one-in-ten close rate and a $45 lead is $450 to book a $300 job. Tighten the close rate or the ticket before you scale.

You cannot service the area or the job. With Google significantly tightening its criteria for crediting out-of-area and wrong-service leads, a loose profile means you’re highly likely to pay for work you can never do.

None of these mean LSA is bad. They mean the front of your operation is not ready to catch what it sends you. Get those right and the math above kicks in hard.

See Your Real Numbers Before You Spend

The table above is the middle of the range. Your market is its own thing, and your competitors are already in it. Before you put a dollar in, it is worth seeing the actual lead costs in your city and what shops above you are pulling.

And once you are running, the Olly Olly LSA Manager works the lever that actually decides your math, making sure the calls get answered, graded, and followed up, so your close rate stays on the side of the ledger where LSA prints money.